re: When did minimum wage become living wage?

if i could jump in for a bit...i see that your discussion is contingent upon the absence of a MW. In that scenario i think a larger share of the folks on welfare rolls would be working. I say that because there are currently no jobs below the MW. If there is no MW, then there will be many more jobs and workers working those jobs.

So, what i'm driving at is this: people that currently work at or above the MW would most likely continue to earn the same wage after repeal of MW (holding all other things constant). But once MW is repealed, there would now be new workers in the labor force that are satisfied working for less than what the MW was. So, in this scenario, i'm not sure if "Wages would drop" as a result of welfare being removed. There would simply be more workers deciding to work to stave off starvation and many more low wage jobs that didn't exist before MW was repealed. Seems like wages would appear to drop because now folks would be working for 3 or 4 bucks and hour, but really what happened was job growth, albeit low wage jobs. i apologize if i'm repeating someone else's thoughts. I didn't read all the comments.